As the New Year approaches and homeowners make resolutions to finally begin that dream home or remodeling project, one woman’s story of permit hell is a measure of the abyss that sometimes yawns between vision and reality.

When Shannon Engelbrecht embarked on her dream home three years ago, she embodied the highest values of the boom time. A well-timed sale of stock options in 2001 allowed her to retire early and funnel her money into real estate projects that helped her friends, family and tenants buy their own homes through equity sharing. A previous column that portrayed her as a “fairy godmother of real estate” brought national attention, including interest in making a reality TV show based on her real estate social work.

The most ambitious project was to be her family’s urban compound: side-by-side homes on Bernal Hill designed by green architect Toby Long and eco-builder Clever Homes.

As planned, the homes were meant to be models of utopian values, both environmentally and spiritually. Designed with solar power, recycled materials, eco-friendly factory-made insulated panels and the city’s first gray-water system, one of the homes would become the place where Engelbrecht and her husband would raise their two young children.

The second equally green home would go to two of their beloved tenants, a lesbian couple with a young boy whose jobs as massage therapists offered them scant chance of becoming Bay Area homeowners. Engelbrecht planned to use her equity-sharing formula and allow the couple to get into homeownership at a deep discount.

Now, three years later, Engelbrecht’s idealism has run headlong into bureaucratic quicksand. A full 588 days since the permit applications were submitted, Engelbrecht is still waiting to receive permission to demolish the water-damaged, ramshackle 1960s house that stands on the site of their dream house.

In mid-December, they learned that after being on the verge of getting approval they were kicked back because of their failure to check a box on a form about the number of stories of the building.

In the meantime, construction costs — thanks to the war, high oil prices and Katrina — have shot up an estimated 40 percent. With the higher cost of building and the fact that Engelbrecht has been carrying two mortgages for three years before breaking ground rather than the one year she had estimated, she has had to scale back her vision. Many of the green elements are being tabled, including solar power and water reclamation.

“It’s sad, because the city is promoting ‘green this and that’ — (and that’s) what we’re doing,” she said. Equally dismaying is the fact that the second home is now in question. “It’s heartbreaking. Because now I don’t know if we can afford it. When my tenants ask, I don’t have an answer for them.”

Somehow, the project has fallen into an underworld of delays and devilish details. How did things go so terribly wrong? Perhaps the project has run into bad luck, but Engelbrecht thinks the long delays are more likely the new business-as-usual. City coffers have been hurting since the dot-com bust, and many departments have reduced staff, which in turn makes getting permits more arduous and time-consuming.

Engelbrecht’s approval process began long before ever submitting applications. “They told us not even to bother until we got the neighborhood approval, although it’s not legally required,” she recalled. Once that was achieved, Engelbrecht and her partners submitted the first plans. It was a year before they were ever reviewed by the planner. From there, the plans have gone through umpteen departments — the Department of Building Inspection, the Public Utilities Commission, the Planning Department, the Department of Public Works and PG&E.

Was the project especially slow because it was green? No, contended Engelbrecht, they shelved anything that looked difficult in terms of permits. “City employees recommended against trying to (get approval for) the unprecedented gray-water system,” she said. “They said, ‘Do it later and don’t tell us about it.’ ”

Engelbrecht was also adamant that she’d taken pains to smooth the process on her end. “From the beginning, I told my husband and my partners there will be no change orders or we’ll get off schedule.”

In the end, Engelbrecht learned that following the letter of the law has its downside. “We’ve played by the rules,” she said, adding that some city employees suggested they would have been better off bending them. “They said, ‘This is crazy. If you had trashed the house, the city would have forced you to tear it down.’ But I thought I’d be a good citizen.”

Who’s to blame? Engelbrecht said that certain parts of the process are egregiously complicated — like the procedure for cutting and restoring power to the property during the demolition. Equally cumbersome was the multi-permit process for removing the sidewalk. She also complained that the Public Utilities Commission and PG&E were particularly unhelpful and difficult to pin down. But, all in all, she has nothing but praise for the people she has dealt with. “They are uniformly pleasant and well informed,” she said, blaming the development spurt coinciding with a reduction in employees. “But they are desperately understaffed.”

She wishes for one central place where she could learn about the whole process. “It would be nice to have someone say, ‘Here’s the whole picture,’ instead of the haphazard way my architect and I had to discover things.”

In a city that is pushing to make itself a green mecca for the nation, it’s too bad the city government hasn’t created guidelines to fast-track green building projects. In the meantime, one of its great local boosters is wondering whether all the money and energy couldn’t have been better spent.

As the days drag on, Engelbrecht can’t help but let doubt sneak into her typically unflappable demeanor. “I spend a lot of time saying, ‘What was I thinking?’ If I knew then what I know now …” Instead of looking forward to the dream, she’s trying to lower her expectations. “My mother said these houses better be special, and I told her, ‘No houses could be that special.’ I’ll never like (them) at all,” she said, if she thinks of everything she went through.

Source:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/31/REGM6N9DRH1.DTL